Inclusive development important to global sustainable growth: World Bank official

13:46, April 14, 2011

Redesigning growth and making it more inclusive is crucial to global and sustainable development in the post crisis era, said a top official of the World Bank Group on Wednesday.

"Redesigning growth means being more inclusive," Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Managing Director of the World Bank told Xinhua in an exclusive interview during the ongoing World Bank and International Monetary Fund' s spring meetings.

"You want to have more sustainable and green growth, which consumes less energy and is more efficient, and with participation of the people promoting their equality," said the World Bank' s senior official, who is one of three Managing Directors reporting to President Robert Zoellick.

The former Indonesian Finance Minister noted that as the world is recovering from the financial crisis, new challenges have emerged.

"The new challenges for emerging economies are the capacity constraint due to the expansion of monetary and fiscal policy, she observed. Now you see inflation everywhere. This becomes more complicated with the capital flows, which go to many emerging countries."

Food has also become a key concern, contributing to inflation, she said, and emphasized that the World Bank is calling for putting food security the top issue of the world development agenda.

Moreover, to keep global growth sustainable means a stronger focus on inclusion. This concept of development has been evolving in recent years.

"The idea of inclusive development in the past focused on providing more capital, so it can create more output, so it can be measured in growth. Higher growth is desirable," she said.

However, "having higher growth does not necessarily provide more sustainability, on the environment side, or on the social side, or even on the political side," Sri Mulyani said, citing the situation leading to unrests in the Middle East.

To tackle the global challenges, developing countries can play a more important role as they have been gaining greater power in the world over the past several decades.

She noted that the experience of development in terms of knowledge sharing is not only from the developing to developing countries, but from the developing to the developed countries as well.

"Many things have changed," she said, adding that developing countries have become the real main players.

"In the past, we might be overemphasizing on the hard infrastructure projects like bridges, roads, irrigation. Now, the World Bank has moved more to issues like human, development in education, health and institution building; including governance, rule of law and anti-corruption. "

"This requires what we call a new multilateralism, a more modern multilateralism, in which the cooperation among the global players is going to be redefined," she added.